Transcriber: Carlos Castillo Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Today, not so many people are reading newspapers,
watching television newscasts.
We're using our phones, tablets, computers;
we're accessing news all the time.
This is because of these new, emerging technologies -
well, more than emerging, we've had them for years,
but still new,
especially for people working in the field of journalism.
So, what I do at BuzzFeed is work in their Open Lab,
which is basically an R&D lab based here in San Francisco.
And I was the first fellow brought on,
and what I'm specifically doing is exploring new ways of telling stories
using all these new tools that are available.
But it all got started when I was three years old,
and I'm going to infuse my presentation with brief little anecdotes
because there's kind of a pattern here,
and it came up with the earlier speakers as well.
Which is that when I was three,
I loved reading National Geographic Explorer -
well, the television National Geographic Explorer,
the magazine National Geographic.
I would sit on the couch for sometimes two-three hours,
and these are stories that my parents, family and friends have told me, recently,
which kind of confirms what I'm doing, in a way.
I would sit there, looking at maps, gazetteers,
and I had a Casio Rapman keyboard,
and I would listen to rap beats, essentially,
that were programmed into my keyboard.
So electronic dance music has factored in my life for many, many years.
But, this is what I did when I was very young.
And this is what I've, sort of, evolved out of.
So, today...
Oh, yeah,
and then there's the hot tub, too.
So, we had a hot tub, growing up,
and when I was four, I would spend most of my time under water
with LEGOs, with submarines, with plastic whales.
I was pretending that I was in the Amazon, that I was in the ocean,
that I was doing my own exploration,
just in the tub.
And occasionally I would come up, and I would tell my dad,
"Imagine we're in a canoe floating down the Amazon," right?
And, again, National Geographic, that's what I was into.
But this has all evolved into what I'm doing today,
which is stuff like this.
So, I've been working with journalists around the world,
prior to coming to BuzzFeed,
covering sports, soccer, rally racing in East Africa;
working with CCTV News out of Nairobi, doing wildlife conservation stories;
working with the African Wildlife Foundation of Nairobi,
you know, flying around, groups of safaris,
going to the Victoria Falls in Zambia,
going to amazing places that I looked at as photographs
in National Geographic.
And now I'm living this, this sort of dream,
flying over wildebeest herds in the Serengeti.
But I'm doing it to share these stories, to share these places, these animals,
what's going on here.
These herds of sort of cellular wildebeests, flowing,
as they travel through the Serengeti during their great migration.
And so, much of my work has been exposing these spaces
from the perspective of the drone.
So flying cameras around the heads of giraffes.
This specific videoclip I showed to a safari guide who said,
"I've been working in the industry for 20 years;
I've seen countless photographs, countless videos of giraffes,
but I've never seen a giraffe like that,
and it felt like seeing a giraffe for the first time."
Hey, that's the drone for you;
it can show the world in amazing ways.
So, for my storytelling with these emerging technologies,
a lot of the work has been with drones,
and doing aerial videography, photography, 3D reconstructions,
working with virtual reality and 360° video.
I'm interested in using technology to take people places,
especially places where they cannot go.
So, I got started
in the Drone Journalism Lab at the University of Nebraska.
As a student, I realized
the greatest part of getting a college degree,
is the time you spend outside of class
with professors, talking about ideas;
sitting in their office, talking about what you're interested in.
And if you're taking their classes, there's some overlap there.
So milk that as much as you can.
The Drone Journalism Lab was started by a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist,
who just happened to be my professor.
He had this idea in 2011,
when the very first consumer drones became available.
He thought,
"We could use this for telling stories in the context of journalism",
and he started the Drone Journalism Lab,
which is the world's first drone journalism program,
either in commercial journalism or in an academic context.
And for me it was perfect
because it was this bringing together of being able to explore the world,
make machines - we were building drones back then -
storytelling and also problem-solving.
We quickly got shut down by the FAA
because of drone regulations in this country, so I went abroad.
I started doing work in India, travelling around with a drone,
taking photographs of places that I went.
This is one of my favorite photographs,
I think ever, just because of that scale of the boats going out to sea at low tide.
I was actually there working on a full break documentary
with my father.
We were doing a fiilm about the wedding marching bands,
and so we were working outside,
and I thought, I'll bring a drone along, and we can capture these wedding bands,
these little mini-parades from the air.
And I loved this guy, who's smiling and looking up at the drone,
and it's just - I love this image.
And, of course, the groom on the horse, you can't even tell he's there;
he's under pounds of flowers.
Cricket.
Again, the perspective of the drone.
We have the players here,
but what I find most interesting about this photograph is the shadows.
It's a completely different way of looking at the game of cricket.
Working for the Times of India,
covering some of their soccer.
I even became a part of the news,
which happens sometimes when I'm working on these projects.
But always working with people on the ground there.
I'm always working with the journalists in Nairobi,
with the journalists in India.
I'm never parachuting in with these fancy, kind of magical tools
and doing my own thing; it's always a collaboration.
Because as the previous speaker mentioned in the video,
there's this element of Westerners dropping in
and sort of acting as imperialists,
even if it's just with these tools,
with these modern technologies that we have access to,
and perhaps people in these places we go to, don't.
So on that note, I went to Nairobi,
and began working with journalists there as well,
working with AfricanskyCam,
and unlike with the Drone Journalism Lab, this is based in commercial journalism.
So, National Geographic,
I haven't worked with National Geographic,
but I'm doing work that clearly connects to what I was into when I was three.
And I've worked with a number of organizations -
just in the past few years -
and really have been able to bring these tools out,
and to show journalists how they can be used.
So, moving away from aerial video, one of the projects -
kind of a sandbox project where I do a lot of experimentation -
takes place in Turkey,
working with archaeologists.
I've been creating 3D reconstructions of archaeological sites,
for their own archival purposes.
But also as a storytelling tool: to share these places,
these spaces, with people who cannot visit Antiochia Ad Cragum.
That was a 3D reconstruction right there.
This here is a head of Medusa.
So, again, storytelling.
Playing around with 3D reconstruction, reconstructing real spaces, real objects,
like this Medusa head - and there's a toothbrush for scale there.
But you can do a lot with this content, so it's great for journalists
because I can take these 3D environments, these reconstructions,
I can drop them into Facebook,
I can share them with people, you can access these models on your phone.
And down here, if you want to play with these reconstructions:
sketchfab.com/benkreimer
And I'll put a link to my website at the end of the presentation,
if you want to play around with these 3D environments.
But there is also the virtual reality element, too.
So, this right here is a videoclip from an HTC Vive VR headset,
where the wearer is basically walking around the archaeological dig.
Now, you could do these kind of projects in any space;
we could create a 3D reconstruction of this auditorium
and you could walk around it, virtually, if you wanted to.
So, this is what's possible now,
and the images were taken using a very small drone, DJI Phantom 3.
I wouldn't be surprised if people on here have Phantoms,
they're kind of the ubiquitous, the common light drone.
So the technology is not that complex, it's not that expensive.
You just have to play around and realize that you can do that,
you can create a VR environment using photos taken by a toy drone,
which costs $900 - I mean, this is fun stuff.
And this here, this photo, was taken at that archaeological dig.
Another project.
So, archaeology is great but what about journalism?
How can these tools and these processes fit into the context of actual journalism?
One project that I did back in 2014,
after I started playing around with 3D reconstruction,
took place in Nairobi.
So, AfricanskyCAM.
I was working on a story along with a reporter
about people who survive off of the trash that they find
in Nairobi's Dandora Dump.
Which is a giant landfill - as you can see -
a giant landfill that supports a slum that surrounds the landfill;
it's about a kilometer long.
You can see there're some trucks here in the middle,
and there're people around there,
you can't see them, but they're digging through the trash,
and they will be selling what it is that they find.
This here is a 3D reconstruction of the landfill.
This is actually a screen recording from within the browser.
Again, these 3D models are very easy to share.
Here I am basically flying around the landfill,
you can see the canyons of trash.
Flying over here, I've added annotations, so I can point out -
Oh, there's a school there,
an elementary school that the borders the landfill
with just a wall that separates it.
The great thing about 3D reconstruction, in comparison to video,
is it gives the user the ability to explore
and to figure out for themselves: what's the space like?
Because if you're just watching a video,
I'm just showing you, and you're only seeing what I,
the producer of the video, wanted you to see.
And so that element of exploration and giving people the power to explore
is kind of a new idea in the context of journalism,
where before, and still today, you're watching videos,
you're reading articles that have been highly produced.
Now, I'm reconstructing an entire space and basically giving it to you.
That's like a video where I'm saying:
"Here you go, check it out for yourself."
And so it really enables spacial storytelling,
it brings the possibilities for spacial storytelling,
for adding that spacial context to stories.
You can do this in new ways that were not possible before.
And going back to when I was three, and I was reading gazetteers and maps -
I loved the idea, when I was three,
of imagining what it was like in the mountains,
reading the topographic maps,
understanding the contours and imagining what it was like to be there.
So there's a connection here.
360 video is related to this element and this idea of spacial storytelling,
and, of course, I've been playing around with drones,
and this is some of my BuzzFeed work here.
Figuring out where can 360° cameras go.
And if you're not familiar with 360 videos, basically,
it's a video that you should watch on your phone or your tablet,
and as you move your device around,
you're looking around within a 360° sphere.
So, again, it gives the viewer the ability to do exploration,
and although there are certain confines, obviously -
it's still video, it's a linear timeline -
but there is that element of being able to do exploration on your own,
and also to put cameras in interesting places.
So, for example,
that helmet that you just saw, the snowboard helmet,
which has two cameras, in the back and the front,
what you get in the end is something like this.
So, again, this is a screen recording
of me playing with the video on my computer,
but basically, I'm capturing everything around me.
And it kind of cuts my body in an awkward way, but that's okay
because a lot of the work that I do at BuzzFeed and outside of BuzzFeed
is very experimental,
and playing with how we can use these tools,
even if maybe in the end
this specific tool doesn't work quite like we would like it to.
But this lets you kind of do a super GoPro video,
where you can actually look around the person,
instead of just what they're looking at.
On drones,
I've been doing the same kind of thing.
Obviously I think drones are a great way to explore spaces
and to capture aerial visuals.
So I've taken cameras that I've modified - they're GoPro cameras, actually -
swapped out the lenses,
and I put in 230° field of view lenses,
which basically means: when the cameras are spaced out like this,
with one camera on top and one camera on the bottom of the drone,
they can create a 360° video sphere.
So I can shoot that kind of 360 video
using just two modified GoPro cameras.
And in the slide before with the helmet,
those are Kodak, believe it or not, Kodak branded cameras,
but they also have the same super fisheye lenses.
So, basically, what you get in the end is video like this,
where the drone actually disappears -
This is shot over off the Costa Pacifica,
where there's this coastline that's eroding these apartments.
Nobody's allowed to go inside because the cliff's is falling away
and taking the apartments along with it.
But in the end you have this sort of magical camera platform;
you can't see the camera or the drone,
but there you are, in space, floating above the cliff.
And, again, I'm using off-the-shelf hardware to do this,
so nothing too fancy or complicated
or too expensive.
So, again, with 360 video I'm bringing media consumers, users,
people interested in the story, into the space.
I want to take people places.
And, if you're interested in virtual reality,
you have the Oculus Rift, you have the HTC Vive,
but few people actually have those headsets.
Right now, really what I'm focusing on, or I'm focusing on at BuzzFeed,
is the mobile device.
So, doing VR content - 360 video -
that anybody here who has a smartphone, can access.
What this says down here is: "Technology can take you places".
It's taken me places, and I want to take everybody else to these interesting,
these perhaps vanishing spaces.
I want to share the world with people who for one reason or another
cannot actually get out to these places that I'm able to go,
as a journalist, as a storyteller,
and working with journalists on the ground.
As for the Casio Rapman -
This has actually played an interesting role on my life,
not specifically this keyboard.
But before the age of 23 - I'm 27 now - I DJ'ed, obviously in the US,
but also China, Sri Lanka, as well as India,
and did music festivals around this country,
so I love electronic dance music.
So, if you're ever feeling lost in life, and don't know what you should be doing,
think back to when you were three,
not about what you wanted to be when you grew up.
I wanted to be a farmer, I'm from Nebraska.
But, this stuff, I mean, reading National Geographic,
listening to my Casio Rapman keyboard, when I was three, I mean,
those pieces of my childhood continue to influence what I do today,
when it comes to exploring, my professional work and my passions.
So, that's my story.
And if anybody has -
because I work collaboratively with people,
I love talking about these ideas and these tools,
which is what all this stuff is -
get in touch, I'd love to hear your ideas.
If you have projects, let me know.
Thanks.
(Applause)